Making up for delays caused by the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the ISSN International Centre undertook the challenge to open two new ISSN national centres this year. Austria will open the 92nd national centre in the ISSN Network, shortly after the launch of the ISSN National Centre for Ukraine in mid-March 2021. The Hauptverband des Österreichischen Buchhandels (the Austrian Publishers and Booksellers Association), in Vienna, will host the ISSN National Centre for Austria starting April 1st, 2021.
Dr. Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Centre, states that “It is a great achievement for the ISSN Network to welcome Austria as a new member country and the Hauptverband des Österreichischen Buchhandels as a new ISSN Centre. Our Austrian colleagues are seasoned professionals who work closely with publishers and show great interest in serial identification activities. The ISSN International Center stands by ISSN Austria to achieve a smooth transition for the benefit of the publishing, scholarly and library communities of this country.”
Mr. Benedikt Föger, President of Hauptverband des Österreichischen Buchhandels, says: “When looking at the way the Austrian Booksellers Association has professionally operated the Austrian ISBN Agency for years, our Association becoming the Austrian ISSN National Centre feels almost predestined. So, I was all the more pleased to learn that we meet all the criteria for joining the ISSN Community”.

The ISSN International Centre is pleased to announce the opening of the 91st National Centre in the ISSN Network in Kyiv, Ukraine. Starting March 11th, the ISSN National Centre for Ukraine is  the newest registration agency under the authority granted by the International Organization for Standardization, ISO, to the ISSN International Centre. The National Centre is hosted by the State Scientific Institution Ivan Fedorov Book Chamber of Ukraine.
Dr. Gaëlle Béquet, Director of the ISSN International Centre states that “After several years of discussion, I am happy that the ISSN Network welcomes Ukraine as a new member country. I would like to acknowledge the unfailing involvement of Ms. Iryna Pogorelovska, the director of the new center, who has carried this project to its conclusion with her team. The ISSN International Center stands by the ISSN Ukraine to achieve a smooth transition for the benefit of the publishing, scholarly and library communities of this country.”
Dr. Mykola Senchenko, the Director of the Book Chamber of Ukraine, said: “The opening of the national ISSN center in Ukraine is a significant event for our state, which also celebrates the 30th anniversary of its independence. Many thanks to the ISSN International Center team for their high professionalism, close cooperation and good attitude along the way.”

DOAJ and the ISSN International Centre have enjoyed a fruitful partnership for several years. The ISSN is a requirement for journals applying to DOAJ (you have to have one to apply). ISSN IC and DOAJ are delighted to announce that DOAJ records now link back to the corresponding ISSN entries in the ISSN Portal.

See that example:  https://doaj.org/toc/0719-0581

The ISSN International Centre will participate in UKSG, to be held online from 12 to 14 April 2021.

The programme is  online.

Dominic Mitchell, Operations Manager at DOAJ, issued a presentation entitled  A Collaborative Approach to Preserving At-Risk Open Access Journals on the collaboration between DOAJ, ISSN IC/Keepers Registry, CLOCKSS, Internet Archive, and Public Knowledge Project to improve the preservation of OA journals.

This paper was presented at The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)’s Spring Membership Meeting held online from 15-19 March 2021.

The open access version of the ISSN Portal now provides a URL link between each record in the ISSN Portal and the corresponding record in the French collective catalogue of the University Documentation System, Sudoc, if it includes location elements.

Sudoc lists all the documentary resources available in the 3,500 member libraries of its network, including nearly 600,000 records of localized continuing resources. Sudoc offers the cataloguers of its networks almost all the records of the ISSN Portal, through bi-monthly uploads of all records created or modified. In return, Sudoc contributes to the ISSN Portal through CIDEMIS application, which allows cataloguers to apply for ISSN assignments, or modifications of existing records, directly to the ISSN centres concerned.

Tanto si eres nuevo en el mundo de los identificadores persistentes como si solo necesitas un repaso básico sobre PIDs, ¡esta sesión introductoria es para ti! En el programa: qué es un identificador persistente, qué pueden hacer y por qué son importantes; también se compartirá información sobre algunos PID clave.

Whether you’re new to the world of persistent identifiers or just need a basic review of PIDs, this introductory session is for you! On the agenda: what is a persistent identifier, what can they do and why are they important; information on some key PIDs will also be shared.

Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ) has been an ISNI registration agency since July 2019, assigning ISNIs to local creatives and increasing the discoverability of cultural content in Québec. A great deal of progress has been made by BAnQ, offering a range of online services, including: automatic assignment of an ISNI; online application to obtain an ISNI for persons and/or organizations; and a Frequently Asked Questions webpage. Since mid-2019, BAnQ has assigned over 215,000 ISNIs to those associated with creative works within the region, emphasising the development of, and ongoing support for, the ISNI standard across Québec.

The British Library (BL) and OCLC are collaborating on a strategic initiative to enrich the links between the international name authority file of the Library of Congress and Program for Cooperative Cataloging (aka the LC-NACO) and the ISNI database. The BL has prepared and submitted a ‘back file’ of NACO records created over the last 5 years, for addition to the ISNI system. The NACO records have been enriched with additional ISBN and title data from the BL’s catalogue and from the LC’s ‘Books All’ file to facilitate matching and disambiguation. Aligning the ISNI database with up-to-date NACO name authorities will facilitate the integration of ISNIs into authority control workflows across the wider library sector and the Linked Data ecosystem. ISNIs derived from NACO correlations are already shown in the BL’s Linked Open Data BNB (British National Bibliography), and the 5-year update will add many more ISNIs to that file.

For the first time, a comprehensive picture of China’s science, technology, and medical (STM) journals and papers is available in the English language. Led by the Chinese Association for Science and Technology (CAST), the Blue Book on China’s Scientific Journal Development 2020, originally published in Chinese and published by EDP Sciences, aims to provide an overall picture of China’s STM journals and papers in a comprehensive, systematic, and transparent way. It presents data to illustrate the overall status of China’s STM journals and provides analyses of current challenges as well as guidelines and rules for development.

A team of Penn Libraries staff has been analyzing an accumulated history of periodicals in the collection—journals, magazines, newspapers, academic journals, comic books—to determine which are no longer restricted by copyright and are therefore available for free and unrestricted use. The Penn Libraries have more than 8.6 million volumes. Many of them did not maintain their copyrights but need to be researched to confirm that. All told, the Deep Backfile project is researching more than 10,000 such serials.

KBR – the National Library of Belgium – has announced an ambitious new project entitled LOD-ISNI – Linked Open Data and ISNI – as a crucial bridge identifier for cultural heritage that will set the foundations for an international network of LOD and ISNI users. It will explore novel uses of, and the advantages to be gained from, LOD/ISNI information exchanges. The international project team includes partner organizations ISNI-IA, major national libraries, OCLC plus Belgian Universities. Find out more about this project in your preferred language here: English, Dutch, French.

La Biblioteca Nacional de España y la Agencia Estatal Boletín Oficial del Estado han firmado un convenio para la colaboración en la conservación y preservación de los boletines oficiales de ámbito nacional y de interés general. Estas publicaciones electrónicas son objeto de depósito legal. El convenio firmado por estas dos instituciones refuerza las garantías para el acceso y la preservación a largo plazo de estos boletines que, por su condición de publicaciones oficiales, constituyen una relevante manifestación del patrimonio bibliográfico español.

The HathiTrust 101 March Madness series introduces services and tools across the HathiTrust organization. You can find recordings on the dedicated YouTube channel (Full HathiTrust 101 Playlist ) The upcoming sessions will be recorded and posted there, as well. Stay tuned for future sessions and topics!

The Ithaka team is in the midst of an 18-month research project to examine and assess how digital preservation systems are developed, deployed, and sustained. They have started analyzing the business approaches of community-based and commercial initiatives through a series of eight case studies. The study focuses on business and operational strategies, and will inform a public report. It aims to not only further increase Ithaka’s understanding of sustainability principles, but also contribute to the development of actionable recommendations to help the sector implement the research findings.

The Big Ten Academic Alliance (BTAA) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) have announced a three-year collective action agreement that provides multi-year support for DOAJ from all fifteen member libraries. The BTAA is delighted to take collective action on behalf of its members to support DOAJ’s mission to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality peer-reviewed, open access scholarly research journals. With this agreement, the libraries of the BTAA affirm their principled commitment to open scholarship for worldwide public good and a more equitable society.

El objetivo que persigue el informe Tendencias Recientes en las Políticas Científicas de Ciencia Abierta y Acceso Abierto en Iberoamérica es analizar el estado de las investigaciones y las políticas científicas en ciencia abierta, datos abiertos de investigación y acceso abierto en Iberoamérica, haciendo hincapié en la incidencia de estos paradigmas en la evaluación científica. Este informe es el primer producto de un convenio de colaboración entre CLACSO y la Fundación Carolina para hacer avanzar la ciencia abierta y la evaluación científica en Iberoamérica.

Knowledge Unlatched (KU), has announced the results of 2020 pledging round, which ended in December 2020. Overall, about 310 books and 34 journals will be published OA in 2021. KU will continue to make the title lists for each collection and unlatching status transparent and update this information regularly, so that librarians can clearly understand which titles are unlatched or will be unlatched soon. Some 630 institutions worldwide have supported KU initiatives to date. By the end of this year, KU’s total impact will number around 2,700 books, and over 50 journals made OA.

Dimensions is a research services portal and citation index alternative to Scopus and Web of Knowledge. Together with the linked, preprint version, the new version of Dimensions gives you the most complete history of an article in one place. Indications of the different routes are available: Green, Bronze, Gold, Hybrid, All OA and Closed. While Bronze and Green OA make up a significant proportion of All OA, the majority of the growth in OA is fuelled by the Gold OA.

[Ver el articulo en español]

From June 2020 to February 2021, a consortium of 10 organisations led by OPERAS (Open scholarly communication in the European research area for social sciences and humanities)  undertook a large-scale study on open access journals across the world that are free for readers and authors, usually referred to as “OA diamond journals”. This study was commissioned by cOAlition S in order to gain a better understanding of the OA diamond landscape. In the part 1 named Findings, it is observed that ROAD, the ISSN Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources, being more inclusive than DOAJ, “is potentially listing many journals that are diamond and that may have sufficient quality but that have not yet applied for inclusion in DOAJ […] ROAD indirectly helps assess the total number of diamond journals statistically by matching the full database with databases that do have information on fee-charging, and by manually checking a sample of journals.”

Find out more about the study and its recommendations.

The event will bring together multiple global perspectives to explore critical topics in Diamond Open Access publishing. Notably, there will be a workshop about the benefits of indexing your Diamond OA journal in DOAJ and how this increases the visibility of OA journals globally; and Abel Packer will speak about the evolution of the SciELO Publishing Model.

Registration is now open. Event attendance is free, but advance registration is required.

The agenda for the upcoming RSC asynchronous meeting, to be held 12-15 April 2021, has been posted. The agenda includes links to two updated standing working group charges (in draft form) which will be discussed at the meeting. The meeting opens at 8 am, Melbourne time (UTC+11) on Monday 12 April 2021 and closes at 6 pm, Pacific time (UTC-8) on Thursday 15 April 2021.

Together with OPERAS, OASPA will be hosting three European-focused workshops on business models for open access books, targeted specifically at small and medium-sized academic book publishers.

For Workshop 1, six publishers will present how they make use of a different business model to publish their books open access, with insights into how these have been implemented in practice.

Register